Archived from the Beautiful Instrumentals Yahoo Group:
3/6/2005
"There was another reason that custom recordings were often attributed to fictitious artists and conductors. If a syndicator was dividing its custom work between only two or three conductors, and their policy was to ID the artists and tracks on air, it would have resulted in an announcer repeating the names of the same artist over and over. The listener, it was felt, would think that the station had a limited artist playlist. So, the same artists would often be given different names.
We didn't do a lot of this at SRP. I felt that most arrangers and conductors had their own distinctive "sound," so to give that person two or three different aliases was a bit overboard. I also never changed the name of a foreign orchestra or artist to make it easier to pronounce. We sent pronunciation guides to all of our client stations. I'm sure that many announcers still wound up not saying the names correctly, but I felt it was only proper to give the foreign performers and titles their credits.
There was a series of albums produced by Gerald Purcell's label GWP that used the artists Paul Robinson and Ed Bland. I was told that Bonneville identified Ed Bland by another name because they didn't like the word "Bland" connected with their music."
- Phil Stout
3/7/2005
"On most of the other RD sets, at Bonneville anyway, Marlin [Marlin Taylor] generally used the actual name of the conductor/arranger. That is, instead of "Sweet With A Beat," Marlin would call the artist "Doug Gamley," or "Al Capps," etc. as labeled on the album. I'm so glad that Phil added the extra reason why syndicators would use pseudonymns. As always, he's right on the money. I can recall that instance with custom recordings by George Greeley. We had a bunch of these at Bonneville and Marlin used several names besides George's to identify these based on differing overall sound."
- Walter Powers
01/21/2008
Phil [Phil Stout] "created the pseudonym "Richwood Strings" and our pal Marlin at Bonneville created the moniker "Ridgewood Strings" (Marlin used his artist name "Ridgewood Strings" mostly for the George Greeley custom tracks.). Of course Marlin had several OTHER pseudonyms like "Buckingham Strings" (Rediffusion/Reditune recordings from the UK), John Avery (for a group of Readers Digest tracks) and one of my all-time favorites the "Irwin Taylor Chorus" (for the Gordon McLendon Singers), after Marlin's Music Director Alan Irwin+Marlin Taylor. This re-naming of artists must be a New Jersey "thing." Of course, the second I arrived in Chicago and worked with Darrel Peters at the FM-100 Plan, after Bonneville purchased that, I came to learn that Darrel called ALL non-commercially available "custom" recordings by the artist name "FM-100 Custom Orchestra." This included Starborne, Ampro, Rediffusion, Greater Media (John Gregory) and his own Norm Geller songs. Talk about making it hard for his listeners to EVER know the name of the artist of the recording they just heard on the air! "
- Walter Powers
